Peltier to Citizens

The News Service of Florida is losing its longest-serving reporter, Mike Peltier, who is going to work for Citizens Property Insurance, which needs somebody who can help the company with its media relations. Peltier, who has also worked as a free-lancer for Reuters and Time Magazine, began regularly working with NSF when the start-up wire service began publishing in 2008 and has written hundreds of stories – many of them about property insurance – for News Service readers. Peltier also is a former Tallahassee reporter for Scripps newspapers and started his career in Florida in 1988 with The Ledger of Lakeland. He’s a Litchfield, Minn.-native and a graduate of the University of Minnesota.

Citizens has been in the news for years – as it grew from essentially a last-resort insurer for coastal residents who couldn’t get private coverage into the state’s largest insurer, to the chagrin of many lawmakers. Of late, it’s also had some issues with employees being accused of behaving badly, from overspending on company travel to just plain strange behavior in public .